Various types of interactive voice response ("IVR") systems are well known in the art and typically comprise some means for prompting a caller who has dialed into the system to enter information and/or questions, often in response to a menu of voice prompts issued via the handset of the caller's telephone, wherein caller entries generally consist of DTMF key tones generated using the keypad of the caller's telephone. For example, the caller may be prompted to enter a "1" to inquire about an account balance, a "2" to speak to a customer service representative, or a "0" to speak to the operator. Assuming the caller enters a "1" in response to the first series of prompts, the caller may be prompted to enter his or her account number and perhaps an associated password, at which point, the system will determine the balance of the account associated with the entered account number and announce same to the caller.
For obvious reasons, IVR systems are widely used in customer service, order status inquiry, banking and financial transaction, voice mail and other applications. Unfortunately, access to information via IVR systems in the above-described manner is somewhat complicated by the fact that the caller is required to remember a number of access phone numbers, account numbers, passwords, and reasonably complicated nested menu structures. Audible instructions typically are provided for guiding the user through the maze of options, but the issuance of such instructions takes up considerable time and places on the caller the burden of remembering options at a particular menu level until the instructions at that level are completed, so that the most appropriate response can be entered.
Moreover, assuming that the caller is familiar enough with the particular IVR system he is using that he has memorized the series of entries he will need to make in order to access the information he is seeking, the user must still manually depress a series of DTMF keys on his telephone, typically corresponding to a series of menu selections, account numbers and passwords, resulting in a number of DTMF "keystrokes" that must be made manually. Again, this is time consuming and inconvenient to a user who wants to access the same or similar information multiple times.
Therefore, what is needed is a system for enabling a caller easily and conveniently to navigate IVR systems that he commonly accesses.